It’s time once again to dip into the depths of my comic book collection and pull out the first thing that I put my hands on. This time, it’s all about Spider-Man. More specifically, Amazing Spider-Man #523 written by J. Michael Straczynski and penciled by Mike Deodato.

I needed to actually flip though this one again just to remember what happened but once I did, I found myself wanting to read through most of the other Spider-Man stuff in my bin. Having fought off the urges, let’s review 523 before my mind starts to wander again.

What caught my attention right away was Terry Dodson’s fantastic cover, which you can see a portion of in the photo at the beginning of this entry. I’ve talked before about Terry Dodson. The man can draw pretty good. Pretty really good. Having a wonderfully simple cover that is expertly drawn is an excellent start to the comic in my opinion.

The rest of the issue was pretty solid as far as the writing is concerned. It actually is the center piece of a much larger arc that was going on at the time involving Hydra, the terrorist organization that is constantly at war the likes of the Avengers, who have created their own evil versions of the classic Avengers lineup. When this comic starts up, Spider-Man is face to face with the robot Thor, Iron Man, Captain America and Hawkeye. Spider-Man manges to survive by exploiting the team’s major weakness, which would be that they seem to be unable to work together, which causes them to practically trip over each other while trying to kill the web-head. When he’s finally literally forced into a corner by the rogue team, the real Avengers blast through the wall and come to his aid. I love cameos. For the rest of the issue, it’s pretty much a slug fest between the two teams as Spider-Man wanders off to try and stop Hydra from launching a missile. The issue ends with him successfully stopping the missile but being blown into the ocean ala Captain America in the old days. Will Spidey survive? I guess so because this issue is pretty old and he’s alive in the current comic. It sort of ruins it. Regardless, this is Straczynski at his best. He was at the prime of his Spider-Man writing and from the story of this issue, you can tell.

The art of Amazing Spider-Man #523 is done by the current Thunderbolts artist, Mike Deodato. It almost looks like he made his artwork a little bit dirtier when he jumped on to pencil Thunderbolts because his work on Spider-Man looks much cleaner and really fits with the simplistic Spider-Man stories. Reading this almost makes me wish that Deodato was doing Spider-Man instead of Thunderbolts. Overall, fantastic art in this issue. Lots of action and Avenger cameos really show off what Deodato can really do.

Amazing Spider-Man #523 is a really great issue and falls into my particularly favorite run on Spider-Man from issue #490 through to #524. Straczynski really had everything working well and Deodato’s artwork was second to none. If you’re in the market to add a couple older titles to your collection, get your hands on this one. You would also probably benefit from a few earlier issues as well that make up the entirety of this story arc.